With Israelis heading to the polls in just a few hours, the polling suggests a fairly tight race, with the right wing Likud in the neighborhood of 26 mandates, the center-right Kadima pulling in roughly 23 mandates, the secular nationalist Israel Beiteinu earning about 18 mandates, the left wing Labor Party garnering more or less 15 mandates, and the religious Shas bringing in close to 10 mandates. No other party appears bound to bring in more than six mandates in the 120-member Knesset.

Over at Slate, Shmuel Rosner has a real outstanding piece on the current dour attitude Israelis have for their political system that is a real must-read for anyone trying to understand what will happen tomorrow. Many are focusing on Israel Beiteinu, Rosner writes, as an example of the trend in Israeli politics for a protest vote in favor of a party without much of a clear ideology or a great deal of staying power. The 15 mandates earned by Shinui -- which literally means change in Hebrew, and stood that and not much else -- is another example of this trend, Rosner explains. However,

[T]here's an even more significant group--albeit a quieter one--and that's the party of the undecided. According to polls, Israel Beitenu is predicted to get 16-19 mandates, that is, around 15 percent of the vote. The undecideds have made a more impressive showing. On Wednesday, professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, one of Israel's leading pollsters, told me that less than a week before election day, 20 percent of Israelis haven't yet decided who they are going to vote for. About one-quarter of them can be pushed into indicating a preference, but the rest will not budge: They just don't know. For a country like Israel--with its high voter turnout and tradition of strong political views--this is an unusually high rate of undecideds.

[...]

In fact, however, these seemingly different groups [those undecided and those supporting Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beiteinu] are really one and the same: They are all disillusioned voters. Just days before election day, Israelis have already made one decision: They don't like the candidates. That's why so many would vote for "something else" (Lieberman); that's why so many don't yet know who to vote for; that's why those who do know split their votes not between two main parties, as normal countries do, but among four or even five major parties. Likud, Kadima, Labor, Israel Beitenu, and possibly Shas, the Sephardic religious party, will be in the range of 15-25 Knesset seats. (The polls currently show Shas with 10 or 11 mandates, but the party traditionally performs better in elections than in polls.)

Being in Israel for nearly two weeks this winter and meeting with campaign advisors, reporters and academics, I came away with a similarly depressed view about the current state of Israeli politics as Israelis themselves apparently have. It's largely the reason that I haven't written much about Tuesday's election even though I wrote a good deal about what I saw in Israel while I was in the country and shortly thereafter.

From left to right, both literally and figuratively, Labor ("Looks truth in the eyes"),
Kadima ("The courage to stand up to blackmail"), and Likud ("Strength in unity").

During my meetings and conversations, I never came away with the sense that anyone in Israel was speaking about a viable long-term vision. Yes, there were thoughts about the short term (weakening Hamas to the point at which it could no longer launch attacks on Israel proper) and even the medium term (perhaps having such relatively small-scale military engagements every few years, with the aim of forcing ceasefires on otherwise reluctant neighbors). But a real vision for years and especially decades in the future was notably missing.

One Israeli I spoke with explained to me that there were, in fact, some long term visions -- but they weren't feasible. On the right, some argue that Israel no longer needs to be a democracy, a choice rejected by the vast majority of Israelis. On the left, some argue that Israel no longer needs to be a Jewish state, a choice similarly rejected by the vast majority of Israelis.

The closest I came to hearing an answer as to how to solve the problems facing the country, as well as the region more broadly, was regime change in Iran. How this move, whether initiated by Israel or even America, would be a panacea was not clear to me (among other things, it seems to me that a power vacuum in Iran would not be preferable to the current situation in which Iran is supportive of Hizbullah, and perhaps Hamas). Even more unclear was how regime change in Iran would take place (and the answer of using 30,000 American troops currently stationed in Iraq to knock out Iranian nuclear sites, thus weakening the governing faction and bringing about regime change, seemed to miss a few logical steps from my vantage).

So with few in Israeli politics offering a real long-term solution -- at least from my perspective -- it's little wonder why only perhaps a half of voters are supporting the three major parties (Likud, Kadima and Labor), so many are backing a party that previously had not wielded much popular support, and such a large proportion are undecided.

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A great deal of attention has been afforded to the news that Israel's central elections committee had banned two Israeli Arab parties from the country's upcoming elections. Though it is entirely correct, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out, that this move would not have affected Israeli Arabs' ability to vote or serve in the parliament as members of other political parties, at first blush this news evoked the dilemma presented to me by a professor in Israel last week: that the two clearest long term solutions were for Israel to either abandon its Jewish nature, or for it to abandon its democratic nature.

But looking into this news, it's not clear to me that this move is quite as cataclysmic as presented. This isn't to say that the move doesn't come off poorly, or that it is particularly wise. Yet this isn't the end of the story. Israel's central elections committee, a political body, does not have the final say in this matter, as Israel's highest judicial body still has the ability to weigh in. Indeed, one of the two parties in question -- Balad -- has been banned previously by the committee, on similar grounds, only to be reinstated by the High Court.

All three motions claimed that Balad must be disqualified on grounds that it does not recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland, and that it advocates an armed conflict against it. Israel's High Court of Justice, in the past, has overturned votes to disqualify Balad from national elections that were based on similar grounds.

According to Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli Arab Balad party will in fact seek the High Court to overturn its ban rather than calling for a boycott from balloting in February, just as it did six years ago. So while it could be the case that the High Court will not reinstate Balad -- a situation I truly hope is not the case because, at least from this vantage, it will damage Israel significantly more than it will advantage the country, not only in the long run but even in the short run -- the country does not yet appear to have crossed the threshold many believe it to have already crossed with regards to the disenfranchisement of Israeli Arab political parties.

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This morning the Haaretz newspaper released new polling on the upcoming election here in Israel, set for February 10, and the results show a shift towards both the Labor Party and the Center-Left more broadly.

Overall, there is now a 60-seat to 60-seat split between the right and the center/left, a switch from the 65-seat to 53-seat split in favor of the right in the prior round of polling. Down to the specific numbers, Bibi Netanyahu and the right wing Likud still lead with 32 seats, up two seats. However, these recent gains have come at the expense of other right parties. The centrist Kadima Party headed by Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni pulls in 27 seats in current polling, up a single seat. Ehud Barak, head of the left wing Labour Party and also the current Defense Minister, earned the greatest gains in the recent survey, up five seats to a total of 16.

The election is, and will continue remain for the next month until balloting, fluid. Israeli politics always is. But this year, in particular, there is quite a bit of potential for movement. There are a number of factors behind this environment. For starters, both Netanyahu and Barak are former Prime Ministers turned out of office by the voters, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and the outgoing leader of the Kadima Party,  Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is leaving office with an anemic 33 percent popularity rating -- which is double the 14 percent average level of support he has enjoyed since the Lebanon War in 2006. In other words, none of the three leading contenders comes into next month's election in a particularly strong position.

Moreover, the general ideologies of the three main parties have largely been discounted by many in the country. The far right's onetime "One Israel" aims, which would have led to either the end to the Jewish nature of Israel or the Democratic nature of the state due to demographic shifts, have not worked. The left's attempts to deal with the Palestinians, largely rebuffed at Camp David in 2000 and during the subsequent fighting, have been rejected by many. And the center's faith in unilateralism, pulling out of Lebanon and then Gaza without coordination with the other side, has yielded armed conflicts with both neighbors.

In short, there aren't a whole lot of positive choices facing Israelis today, and thus it's understandable that sentiments about the upcoming elections are not hardened. Next week, I'll be meeting with leading party advisers, as well as a number of academics, reporters and others, to try to flesh out more of what is going on in the country, both focusing specifically on the election as well as the conflict with Gaza, so stay tuned.

Update [2009-1-1 14:38:29 by Jonathan Singer]: More from Ben Smith on how some of the recent shifts within the electorate are linked to the current conflict in Gaza.

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